TRUTH MARATHON -- screenplay-novel trailer (excerpt)

[This is the opening to the screenplay-novel trailer for Truth Marathon]

VOICE-OVER: We live our lives and look for happiness. That's the degree of truth that we care and know about. But sometimes truth is deeper than this. Sometimes truth is not only buried in our personal past, but the past of all the world. Sometimes the truth we have to face is that of history itself.

INTERIOR. A BEDROOM.

A young couple is kissing ardently. The male is Western: slim, intelligent-looking, but with blemished skin and a somewhat awkward and self-conscious manner. The female is Asian: flowing dark hair, high cheekbones, tawny beautiful skin. Yet while she's far more attractive than the male, there is a mute sadness to her, as if she, not he, is the one who finds day-to-day life -- the simple actions of fitting in and being "normal" -- hardest.

PAUL: [whispering] I love you.

SARAH: [not looking at him directly] Just hold me.


[to see the rest, click here]

TRUTH MARATHON -- outline and context

[This is the opening of the outline of TRUTH MARATHON]:

TRUTH MARATHON works on several levels.

On the one hand, it's a social novel: Paul, the protagonist, works on contract. And although as an educated individual with a professional job he is supposedly a member of the middle class, in fact his life is a near-constant series of crises that result from borderline poverty and lack of job security.

His boss hates him. His apartment has rats. His father -- a genial, intellectually gifted individual diagnosed with schizophrenia (he is on medication) -- lives on welfare, spending his days conducting "research" into what he terms "some of the greatest stories never told". On top of this, Paul's mother, who many years ago divorced his father, can't seem to let the relationship go. Unfortunately, the way she expresses her concern is through nagging. The particulars of his life aside, Paul is emblematic of what so many people nowadays live through. In short, Paul is an Everyperson of 21st Century society.

But the novel is also a love story about Paul's relationship with an Korean-Canadian co-worker named Sarah. Sarah is beautiful -- no, she's extraordinarily beautiful, and the pull Paul feels toward her is irresistable. But Sarah also has the capriciousness of the beautiful, and it doesn't help that she is possibly alcoholic.

Sarah's gotten under his skin. Paul loves her ardently, without restraint. Paul has had girlfriends before. But not like this. And so, when she denies that she has a drinking problem, Paul, besotted, tries to keep up with her degree of alcohol consumption rather than bring her back to his level. And in the midst of all this, his problems with work and parents just increase.

But TRUTH MARATHON has an extra element, and that is history: at the heart of Paul's relationship with his father and also his relationship with Sarah are two of the great mysteries of the 20th Century: How could Pearl Harbor and the Korean War have happened the way they did? How could sneak attacks of such devastating magnitude not been foreseen?...

to read more, click here

Male Brains, Female Brains and Fictional Narrative

My article "Male Brains, Female Brains and Fictional Narrative" is up at LitKicks.

Anniversary of an Idea

Before the book trailer, before the idea of combining book marketing with the power of short movies, a year ago last Friday I began posting on the idea of the screenplay-novel. The idea is a fairly simple one: merging the form of the screenplay with the depth of character and plot development of a novel (in other words, a screenplay-novel is a longer, more involved work than a regular screenplay).

The idea of writing fiction in screenplay form is not especially new; satirists have been doing this for decades. But where I think the screenplay-novel idea is new is in terms of combining images ("stills") with the text, and also in writing a text that is more novelistic in its style than an actual screenplay would be. (I was once criticized for failing to write a correct screenplay; it's a failure I was proud of achieving.)

Below is the "screenplay-novel trailer" to the work I've been laboring on -- Truth Marathon. It's a story that works on several at once. It is a social novel about Paul, an impoverished teacher trying to survive in the cut-throat world of contract work while helping his mentally unstable father -- an apparent crank who insists that there was a conspiracy behind Pearl Harbor. It's a love story about the relationship that develops between Paul and a co-worker -- a beautiful Korean-Canadian named Sarah. And it's about the weight of history: Sarah is haunted -- by mysterious events in her own background, as well as by the history of her native country. It turns out that Korea, too, had its own "Pearl Harbor".

Here is the trailer. Here are FAQs about the screenplay-novel idea. Here is art that might go with the publishing project. Here is an outline that also gives some historical context and explains why this novel works on several levels. And here is the very first excerpt from Truth Marathon.

I've completed the manuscript. If you're an agent or editor interested in seeing the complete work, you can contact me at fharvor at yahoo dot com.

TRUTH MARATHON -- screenplay-novel trailer

VOICE-OVER: We live our lives and look for happiness. That's the degree of truth that we care and know about. But sometimes truth is deeper than this. Sometimes truth is not only buried in our personal past, but the past of all the world. Sometimes the truth we have to face is that of history itself.

INTERIOR. A BEDROOM.

A young couple is kissing ardently. The male is Western: slim, intelligent-looking, but with blemished skin and a somewhat awkward and self-conscious manner. The female is Asian: flowing dark hair, high cheekbones, tawny beautiful skin. Yet while she's far more attractive than the male, there is a mute sadness to her, as if she, not he, is the one who finds day-to-day life -- the simple actions of fitting in and being "normal" -- hardest.

PAUL: [whispering] I love you.

SARAH: [not looking at him directly] Just hold me.

INTERIOR. A LANGUAGE SCHOOL.

Paul is teaching.

PAUL: [friendly in a rah-rah sort of way] Hi, everyone! Today we're going to talk about vacations. Where would you like to go on vacation?

A CHINESE STUDENT: New York.

PAUL: [turning to another student, this time Korean] Great! Good! How about you, Hyun-sook? Would you like to go to New York also?

HYUN-SOOK: I hate New York.

PAUL: Oh. Okay.

HYUN-SOOK: [with deranged venom] I hate New York because I hate America! America destroyed Korea!

PAUL: [trying to make light of it and be ironic] Oh. Well, guess you'll have to stick to travelling in Canada, eh?

HYUN-SOOK: No! I just here for English! I hate Canada, too! I hate all Western countries!

JUMP-CUT. A LIVING ROOM IN A SHABBY HOUSE.

PAUL'S FATHER: [with a manic gleam in his eye] Sure, they tell you that it was all a surprise ... Pearl Harbor and all that. It wasn't a surprise! They knew! Roosevelt knew and he kept it a secret! And the Korean war, too. That was foreseen also by Truman. It was how they operated!

PAUL: [upset] That's just conspiracy theory stuff, dad.

PAUL'S FATHER: Look at the facts.

PAUL: What facts? If the facts were there, everybody would know them.

PAUL'S FATHER: Bullshit. People are sheep. That's the biggest fact of all.

PAUL: Dad, you're sick. That's why you believe these things. Because of the ... chemistry in your head.

PAUL'S FATHER: [getting angry] Bullshit times two!

PAUL: [pleading] It's not, dad. You've got to stop believing these things. They're not true.

PAUL'S FATHER: They are true! For both Pearl Harbor and the Korean War, there were government coverups on a massive scale.

PAUL: [almost in tears] No, Dad. You can't keep secrets that big.

PAUL'S FATHER: Then check it out. Talk to the same professor I met.

[He hands Paul a card.]

INTERIOR. A UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR'S OFFICE.

Paul and Prof. Demsky are talking.

PROF. DEMSKY: Your father may not be quite the same as the rest of us ... but that doesn't mean he's delusional.

PAUL: What? You're saying there were coverups?

PROF. DEMSKY: I'm not saying anything categorically. I'm saying that when you look at the evidence objectively -- when you look at what government records and what trained scholars already can demonstrate is factually verifiable -- then you ask an entirely new set of questions.

PAUL: So what's the bottom line? Is my dad onto something? Or just delusional?

[beat]

PROF. DEMSKY: [quietly] Your father is in some ways a perceptive man.

PAUL: So the Roosevelt administration did know about Pearl Harbor? And Truman did know the North Koreans were going to attack?

PROF. DEMSKY: Let's just say the weight of evidence suggests a situation that was far more complex than the official story.

INTERIOR. THE LANGUAGE SCHOOL.

Paul and Sarah are meeting. They're clearly in the first blush of love.

PAUL: Hi.

SARAH: [smiling shyly] Hi.

Then Paul simply smiles. The ardor that he feels is plain.

PAUL: Let's go somewhere.

SARAH: [sadly] I can't. I have to help --.

She turns away.

PAUL: What?

SARAH: Nothing.

EXTERIOR. A CITY STREET.

The young man PAUL is chasing the young woman SARAH. She is clearly upset.

PAUL: Please, Sarah! I wanna talk to you!

SARAH: You can't talk to me! You have nothing to say!

A BEDROOM.

Paul and Sarah are making love.

PAUL: [beside himself] You have no idea how much I love you.

SARAH: [weeping quietly] I love you too.

beat.

SARAH: Excuse me.

She stands to go the washroom. She quickly puts on her clothes.

PAUL lies on the bed, a contented look on his face.

SFX: A door slamming.

PAUL runs to the door. It's ajar. Wind blows against. No Sarah.

Paul is shocked.

EXTERIOR. A HOUSE AT NIGHT.

PAUL is drunk. He's outside Sarah's house.

PAUL: Sarah!! Sa-raaaaaaaaahhh!

A light comes on on the second floor.

INTERIOR. A HOUSE.

Paul confronted by Sarah's mother, Ms. Bak.

MS. BAK: [furious] What can you understand about us? You're just a Westerner!

*

SFX: Low, foreboding music.

VOICE-OVER: Sometimes if you want to find out what really happened, you have to go the distance.

Various

"The Coward" by Brian Bishop

Amy Reiswig on St. Petersburg

Matt Bell makes a call for submissions

Noah Berlatsky on Jenna Jameson

Noah Cicero interviews Lisa Carver

"Streetwise" by Bobby Farouk

Peter Bergen on 9/11

Site links

For a post that describes what this site is all about in frequently-asked-question form, click here.

To see the screenplay-novel Truth Marathon, click here.

Ecstatics vs. Ecclesiastics

J F Quackenbush on the creative process:

There is a difference to be elucidated between the Ecclesiastic writer and the Ecstatic writer. This division has to do with the nature of fascination and Ecclesiastics and Ecstatics are cut from all cloths, exist in all classes, and perdure in all history. An Ecstatic is one who believes in the power of fascination to impart some sense of immediacy on the work. The Ecstatic believes that work must fascinate first. The Ecclesiastic is one who looks down his nose at immediacy and fascination. He is more concerned with doctrine and the nature of convention, and believes that the work of its own merit will draw the reader if the reader is worthy of the work. It is better to be an Ecstatic than an Ecclesiastic.

Gnosticism

Waggish on the graphic story "The Veiled Prophet":

This cosmology is a gnostic one in that the eternal world reveals itself subjectively and in pieces. Yet David B. seems ultimately concerned with the idea that it is precisely the illusory world that allows we as people to exist and to survive. Every incursion of the Real destroys us. Merely to touch the Real, as Ziska does at the end of "The Armed Garden," is enough to blind one. People exist in the space between the Real and nothingness, condemned to see the world in lies and misunderstanding, and it is those fictions that form our very existence. Fictions keep the Real at bay, though it remains a constant presence.